this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Following the Nuremberg principals they would actually all be war criminals, but of course those principals only apply if they are convenient. So clearly all these people with credentials are massively hypothetical just like everyone else.
And for vaccines: almost no one is educated sufficiently in the field of immunology to judge for themselves if the vaccine is safe, so you are always dependent on trust. And if the government has over and over again shown to be completely untrustworthy, by for example starting a war (where more then two hundred thousand people died) based on lies, or bailing out the perpetrators of the biggest financial crisis in living memory, then who can blame them for not trusting the government when it tells them to trust the vaccine. It’s unfortunate but not unexpected.
ok let's just say that you know what you're talking about and that this is true. why would you hold todays presidents accountable according to laws 80 years in the past? like everyone else, the should be convicted according to todays laws, if they broke them.
yes, this is why you believe the people who know the science, who studied immunology/law
regarding vaccines you don't have to trust the government, you have to trust the scientists. just because the government (who isn't trustworthy) trusts them too, doesn't mean they're suddenly wrong. as for the war criminal debate this means that if the government says that the presidents aren't war criminals, you don't have to believe them. you have to believe the experts who studied law on whether the presidents did something illegal or not.
all I'm saying is that it isn't an opinion whether someone is a criminal, there are qualified experts who can evaluate this. if you're not one of those you can't make a qualified statement on this and if you do you can be called out for it.
I need you to understand that if I call someone out for making an unqualified statement on a legal topic that doesn't mean that I don't want people to 'participate in democracy unless they have the right credentials'. it means that I don't want people to make statements on legal topics unless they have the right credentials.
A crime is an act against the law, the law is determined by the will of the people (or at minimum it should), so yeah criminality is subject to opinion. You can be pedantic about whether something is a crime if the current laws don't match your opinion. But again Nuremberg shows that with a sufficiently large crime the chronology of something becoming a law and the moment a crime was committed is not necessarily important. And at least for the Iraq war I would argue this is very much up for debate.
this doesn't matter. a judge only cares about somebody's actions and what the law says about these actions. jurisprudence isn't democracy. if the majority of people thinks that someone is guilty it doesn't matter. what matters is if they violated laws and that can only be evaluated by a professional. so if the majority of people thinks that Bush for example is a war criminal it doesn't matter if he didn't violate any laws. of course this goes the other way around too: if 99% of people think that he isn't a criminal, but he violated laws, he is guilty. the majority of people can't decide whether someone is guilty or not.
of course the majority of people votes the government which passes laws to it's voter's liking, so there's a big intersection between existing laws and the will of the many. but ultimately the judge doesn't care about all of this. for them it's simply "does action violate law?". outside of this question nothing matters.